boyingray

[boyingray]

Have you ever seen a violinist going APESHIT?!

Be sure to check out IAmDSharp!

[boyingray]

Would you believe this wisdom came from Facebook? Anyway send this to anyone using conservative rhetoric in leftist spaces.

[boyingray]

Your yearly reminder that polyamorous people are queer in every sense that matters.

Unsupported by government, unable to marry the people we love. Risking consequences if we come out within our family, if we come out at our work, in custody arguments against a non-polyamorous person because we are considered a danger or bad influence on children. A challenge to heteronormative conceptions of what love and relationships are meant to be.

Most polyamorous people are queer to start with, because once you start questioning heteronormativity, you start asking other questions about what a sexual or romantic or committed relationship should be. But that doesn't mean that polyamory isn't inherently queer in and of itself.

Please don't forget us in your queer positivity posts. Please don't forget us when you think about what queerness encompasses.

I've seen countless people, many who are fellow queers, talk shit about poly relationships because "they never last", as if most relationships last? As if most people don't have several exes? Meanwhile I'm sitting here in my stable triad polycule that.... in a couple years I will have been in this polycule for as long as I was outside of it (you know, when I was a child). It's an open polycule too, we've all had relationships outside of the triad and we're all still good and happy with each other. My triad has outlasted my heterosexual parents' marriage by many many years.

Stop being weird about poly people. We're exactly as queer as the rest of queer people, and we need you to recognize that.

[boyingray]

To me there's a deeper meaning, though I don't know how to express it, on people using pathologizing language in education i.e. "cognitive atrophy" "brain damage" as an explanation for learning issues.

Which to be fair, the authors of that paper asked specifically not to be used, but the twitter thread linked on that post (which has 38k notes as of this post, jesus christ) did use, extensively. Using language such as "brain damage", "cognitive atrophy" and how could I forget, "soulless".

However, the authors of the paper also didn't have a good methodology, other people have gotten into it better than myself, but the paper does not really point to any cognitive decline, and the methodology used does not offer long-term explanations. But what I do think is that when we're talking about things such as AIs in education, or any other new technology, we should investigate them as tools used in a social context. Why do people use AI as a tool? How do educators and instutions handle this? In which way this tool worsen education or might, god forbid, enhance it? Here the focus, as so much Usamerican education research at least in my experience, is on almost purely numerical and anatomical (EEG? really?) results rather than any pedagogical studies on the tools and their users. (and those results are very poor too)

And once you go down the road of finding pathological answers to educational issues, you will start finding pathological solutions instead of social ones. Why try to confront social or familial issues, when these students obviously have something wrong with their brains? Hell, why even provide them with education, their brains can't even handle it. Eventually you might as well give up and just educate the worthy ones. If you don't believe me, see how education and mental healthcare in the US works.

For someone like me who believes that education is fundamentally a social institution and that every student comes from a social and cultural background that needs to be understood before the process of learning begins, these studies (or rather, unhinged twitter threads) that claim that a complex process like learning can be understood in pathological terms are profoundly hostile to me.

[boyingray]

this australian guy wrote about the columbia protests when he was a student here. he hid his substack and deleted his social media apps before he went on a trip back to the US to visit friends. he was detained, interrogated extensively about palestine by two border patrol agents, then deported back to australia.

^ that's a quick summary he wrote after the experience. the longer new yorker article is really jarring. link without paywall here

[boyingray]

yeah im “transitioning” *dissolves into tiny pieces as i click to the next slide*

[boyingray]

Let’s all light a candle and pour one out for all the trans men who never got to figure out they’re men because they were raised to believe they couldn’t ever be anything other than a wife and a mother and if they ever left the church that all their friends and family go to then they’ll burn in hell for all of eternity. May the names engraved on their tombstones fade to nothing and the dresses they were buried in disintegrate.

[boyingray]

Let’s all light a candle and pour one out for all the trans men who never got to figure out they’re men because they were raised to believe they couldn’t ever be anything other than a wife and a mother and if they ever left the church that all their friends and family go to then they’ll burn in hell for all of eternity. May the names engraved on their tombstones fade to nothing and the dresses they were buried in disintegrate.

[boyingray]

Non passing trans men don't benefit from misogyny whatsoever, besides possibly on the internet. If they are seen as a woman in someone's eyes, especially legally, they do not benefit from it. If you are not seen as a man by society, regardless of if you are or not, you do not benefit from misogyny.

It's that fuckin simple.

[boyingray]

This is who is leading the NYC mayoral democratic primary rn

[boyingray]

somewhere out there right now is a kid with curly hair being raised by people who have wavy hair at best and those people are giving them 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner and telling them to dry brush it. and that kid is gonna spend all of middle school and high school hating their hair and moping over the flat iron. they're being told right now that if they don't dry-brush their curl pattern into oblivion every morning it means they're unkempt and gross even though they naturally have the kind of ringlets that a thousand bridezillas would commit horrible murders for every june. it's happening right now it's an absolute epidemic and a tragedy every time

[boyingray]

Add realism to your fantasy stories by having characters from different backgrounds struggle to pronounce each others' names.

"My name is [low guttural sound] but I don't want to hear you butcher it. So you may call me She Who Arises With The Cold Mountain Sun."

"...Is that what your name really means? All that in just one word?"

"Yes. If you stress the wrong syllable it comes out as 'She Who Coldly Wakes Up The Mountain Sun', or 'The Cold Woman Who Wakes The Mountain Sun', and you will not call me that."

"Oh, huh. Could we just call you Mountain Sun, for short?"

"Hmh. It's boastful, almost bordering on blasphemy, but it is flattering. I accept it."

[boyingray]

I dunno. I think that what bugs me most is that, coming out of the Second World War, it felt like there was all of this talk about how humanity had learned its lesson and things would be better in the future and we would break the cycle of history and things like "Never Again" actually had meaning.

And now here we are. Again.

And again and again and again and again and again and again

[boyingray]

Ice cold takes from a Transgender Woman:

Not all Men are evil

Everyone has the capacity for evil

Transgender Men are men

Transgender Women are women

Excluding Cisgender Men from your spaces requires Transgender Men to out themselves if they want to engage (Same for Women)

Anyone can be Non-Binary, there is no "look" or requirement

Non-binary masculine presenting people should be welcome in queer spaces, many are just treated as men and predators

Non-binary feminine presenting people should be welcome in queer spaces without being seen as "Woman-Lite"

[boyingray]

part of the reason i love how bell hooks talks about masculinity is that she shows real compassion towards men suffering from the effects of toxic masculinity. she was conscious of how we need to unlearn the ways we talk about men + masculinity just as much as we need to unlearn the same for women + femininity. so many times ill see someone talking about toxic masculinity like (hyperbolizing here but only slightly) "these FUCKING STUPID BABY BITCHES won't MAN UP and go to a therapist!!!" and like. i get the anger. but you see feminists recreating patriarchal manhood by only promoting good behaviors through patriarchal frameworks. any use of the term "real men" is bad because it reifies the idea that manhood is a special title you must earn, and it is something possible to fail and fake. & as important as it is to promote sexual equality + the pleasure of non-cis-men, lots of people are essentially still working with the idea that men need sexual prowess to have worth but just shifting it slightly so there is more emphasis on women's pleasure. but I want cis men to think about their partners' pleasure because they care about their partners, not because they need to check a box in order to keep their man card. and don't get me started on small dick jokes– and the absolutely pitiful excuse people will use that "well, I don't believe it, but misogynistic men get upset when I say it, so it's okay!"

basically bell hooks is so fucking right. in order to create loving men we need to love men, simply for being alive, whether or not they are performing. as much as we need to actively unlearn misogyny (and we do), it's equally vital we unlearn patriarchal ways of seeing manhood. we can't just assume that taking a feminist perspective automatically means there is no work to be done there.

[boyingray]

I'm keeping an eye out for heat stroke in my area and I can't figure out what a full body flush would look like on dark skin since all the pictures are just fake training pictures. Anyone have video/pics of a heat stroke flush on black skin?

[boyingray]

i brought up the term enban/enben to someone who said they felt enby was infantilising, and someone else (also nonbinary) commented in response "sometimes i feel like folks just get off on having their own secret codes" and that they wouldnt know what it meant if someone said it to them without an explanation

like a. wtf??? and b. i don't think its that hard to figure out what it means? its just the start of enby + the ending of man/woman

Yeah unfortunately that's a reaction a lot of people have to nonbinary neologisms.

And like. I do understand it somewhat. But I honestly can't help but feel that part of people's resistance to new nonbinary-specific terms is exorsexism. Like... yeah. You won't know it what it means until someone explains because it was just invented. Every single word relating to nonbinary people that we have invented, we have at some point had to explain. To say that a neologism is bad because it's not immediately fully intuitive to you with zero explanation is like. Yeah friend! That's how making new words works! Especially when the word is trying to describe something who's existence has been completely excluded from our culture for the past forever!

I do understand people who personally dislike using enby (I'm not big on using it for myself either, I prefer enban), but I think people will very uncritically call any given nonbinary term "infantilizing" and say stuff like "just call me a slur instead!!" without realizing where that impulse can come from. It's similar to how anything that becomes associated with women develops a reputation for being stupid and shallow and annoying—people have ingrained biases against nonbinary people, so when something reminds them of nonbinary people, they feel an aversion towards it.

People will come up with every single possible reason why every possible neologism won't work (too long, too short, too latin, too germanic, too cringe, too boring) and the end result is that nonbinary language never is able to move forward. Our language will always require explanation and seen abnormal as long as we do not popularize their use, and in order to popularize their use we have to get over our aversion to our own language.

It's not about wanting to be special or "having secret codes," it's about having the basic linguistic visibility that binary people already have. It's about being able to discuss ourselves and each other with ease and clarity and specificity. If you are fine just being called a "person" and using pre-existing gender neutral language for yourself, that's fine. But we deserve so much better than binary people's linguistic scraps. And that means we have to confront what it looks and sounds like to not just casually gender neutral but actively, blatantly outside of the binary in a way that makes people confused or uncomfortable.